It
is trendy to view any revolutionary movement worthy of its cause as a
bunch of terrorists. This attitude is but a terminally lazy reflection.
Should the intelligent impulse to honest enquiry be nipped in the bud in
any free and democratic state then the concept of a "free world" becomes
slightly more farcical. In any civilized society, the barometer of
tolerance has to measure its freedoms (both in speech and thought)
inclusive of its civil liberties. At any rate, valid questions will need
to be voiced: if humans are essentially inter-related while existing on an
inter-dependant globe, what is our moral responsibility in this fractured
world? Who is the keeper of the "other"? Or does it all simply boil down
to whether your view is not exactly "my cup of tea" and therefore, you
could be a potential threat?

There is a freedom struggle
that has gone on for many decades on the island of Ceylon/Sri Lanka. This
blood-soaked struggle began in the '50s as a non-violent protest against
state hegemony and terror. The Sinhala state has continued systematic
suppression of the Tamil-speaking peoples and denied them equal rights --eventhe right to decent education and jobs. In the early '70s,
Tamil youths were barred from higher education, in spite of their scoring
top-grades. The Sri Lankan system of apartheid has employed
violence as a primary mode of oppression since 1958. The straw that broke
the Tamil camel's back was the "near-miss" genocide in July 1983.
[1]

A Shift

In July 1983, the mind-set of
the majority of Tamils shifted. There had been appalling mass serial
killings of the dispossessed before -- but things were to be different
this time. The killings had gone one step too far and had exhausted the
patience of all Tamil youth, opening the eyes of the young middle-class
Tamils.

The climate was now fully
ripe for voluntary recruitment to the Tamil armed resistance movement;
this was a time when Tamil consciousness even among Westernized Tamil
youths was at a peak. Because the Tamil Liberation Movement (LTTE) is a
highly disciplined secular movement, its recruitment policies were
stringent. The primary goal of the LTTE is to recover the lost sovereignty
of the Tamil nation. A compelling alternative available then was to train
a large-scale militant force to employ violence in defense and if
necessary, in pre-emptive strikes in order to engage in an ongoing battle
for the UN–recognized right to self-determination.

Luxury

It must be hard for the
citizen of a Western democracy to visualize the dehumanization faced by
Tamils. Cold-blooded killings of journalists, disappearances of political
commentators and human rights activists, and humiliating intimidation of
all Tamils are deemed to be the norm in Sri Lanka. It is impossible to
comprehend the reasons why the Tamil struggle feels it has to utilize
violence as a counter-terror tactic against the government -- which is, in
fact, a pretender to democracy. Such brutal forces feed the powerful
nations of the West with their disinformation and noxious propaganda:
often hiring Western PR firms in order to create seductive persuasions of
"make-believe" that these fighters for emancipation are nothing but
bloodthirsty terrorists. The foreign ministry of the Sinhala state peddles
misperceptions and uses that weapon to manipulate Western democracies to
downplay the state’s horrendous human rights abuses. The tragedy however,
is that this is done in the name of democracy. We must be mindful of the
fact that Sri Lanka has in the guise of democracy a politico-Buddhist
police-state dominated by elite Sinhala dynasties. [2]

When was the last time
Western citizens had to see their sons being lined up, shot down, and
buried in a mass grave? How many times does one has to endure the
humiliation of being impotent during the rape, murder, or worse of his
daughters and wives? Being forced sometimes to exist with the pregnant
trauma -- shunned by society? One must be careful not to judge
prematurely while seated in the relative luxury behind the high moral
walls in established democracies.

Misperceptions

Three misperceptions that are
propagated by the Sinhala State are considered.

The first misperception is
that the National Tamil Question in Sri Lanka is simply a minority grunt.
That is being economical with truth.

The indigenous Tamils have
inhabited their traditional homelands from time immemorial. When the
Portuguese set foot in Ceylon in 1505, the island was comprised of three
kingdoms: in the north, Jaffna; in the centre, Kandy; and in the Southwest
Maritimes, Kotte. The invaders secured possession of the southwest
districts by 1594. The annexation of the Tamil Kingdom happened in 1619.

The Dutch began ruling the
maritime districts in 1638. The Maritime Provinces came into the hands of
the British on the 1st of January 1802. The first steps toward unified
administration of the whole island were taken in 1831 through the
Colebrook-Cameron Royal Commission. The so-called unification of Ceylon
under the Sinhala majority was a British administrative device. Adrian
Wijemanne, a Cambridge-based Sinhala intellectual observed:

The British were well aware
that two wholly disparate (and in the past frequently antagonistic)
races were thus yoked together under their rule but administrative
convenience was all that mattered. [3]

The LTTE seems, quite rightly
so, to take a dim view of the portrayal of this conflict as a minority vs.
a majority. Some describe the Sinhalese as having a "minority complex of
the majority" [4] because the Sinhalas add the South
Indian Tamils in Tamil Nadu to their numbers. Such reckoning fosters
suspicion and unfounded phobia. The historical fact remains, however, that
the Sinhalese have subjugated the Tamils since independence from the
British in 1949. Their struggle for emancipation begs for sympathy from
the international community.

The second misperception is
the propagation of the mode of the struggle adopted by the LTTE in
combating state terror. The first question, however, is whether the state
(however brutal it might be) has a monopoly on "morally-sanctioned"
killing? When a state turns out to be the aggressor and oppressor of its
own citizens, what ought to be the response of desperate communities? Is
state terror more legitimate than the violent defense of a suffering
people? Professor Juergensmeyer (Global Studies, University of California,
Santa Barbara) observes that the designation ‘terrorism’ is a subjective
judgment about the legitimacy of certain violent acts. [5]
One person's terrorist is another person's liberationist.

When a state's own citizens
are subjected to systemic racist discrimination and systematic violent
dehumanization, what should the dispossessed community’s response be to
expose the genocidal intent of the State? Staying passive with only the
hope of a 'good Samaritan' international community being parachuted in
might be ‘too little, too late.’ Rwanda is a classic case in point! For a
young Tamil, the state gives only a couple of options: either you submit
to its brutality or you stand against its military might. Such humiliation
attracts, perhaps, young minds to become human bombs
to draw attention to their suffering! Alarming? Yes; but that's the
reality! It's high time for the international human rights community to
intervene with a genuine radical edge in order to peacefully end the
hegemony of the Sri Lankan state.

Third, there is the
misperception peddled by the state that the Tamil emancipation is part of
the global network of terror. Primarily, the Tamils are neither anti-West,
nor anti-democracy. [6] They have repeatedly expressed
their willingness to negotiate within the axis of peace. The Tamil
resistance movement has no religious underpinnings as its motivational
rationale. The human bombs used by the LTTE have no religious impetus. It
was indeed an 'extreme' form of a desperate response to humiliation;
rightly or wrongly -- to protest against the brutal might of the state.
One might view that as a political statement written in blood for human
emancipation from the clutches of hegemony. It’s not part of LTTE's
strategy to encroach into the Sinhala territory. Neither is the LTTE using
violence as a means to accrue state power nor to engage in a coup d'etat,
such as the failed attempt by the Sinhala Marxists (Janatha Vimukthi
Peramuna or JVP -- People's Liberation Front) in 1971. The Tamil struggle
is against the occupation of the Sinhalese military and the secret
colonization in their traditional homelands. The LTTE has not engaged in
using violence as a bargaining chip for negotiated settlement. People need
to distinguish between the terror of a chauvinistic police state and an
armed national struggle with genuine aspirations for self-determination.
Western nations may have to revise their posture from confusing legitimate
armed struggles as terrorism. Such a quixotic view would still incarcerate
Mandela.

Leverage

This writer is not proposing
that violence is right; violence is indeed a delusive and an abusive
power. If the international community wants all nation states to abolish
the institution of war in order to create a non-violent world, then the
Tamils would not hesitate in supporting such a treaty. Currently,
however, the Tamils are deeply concerned about the state violence that is
inspired and instigated by state religion and institutional racism. In
national struggles against such state terror, violent defense might be a
necessary evil! Nonetheless, we need to distinguish so that no ruthless
state is allowed to manipulate the argument of global terrorism to their
ends. The Sri Lankan state thus far has managed to do exactly this.
[7]

The Sri Lankan state is
cunningly using the current ceasefire to engage in a pernicious "shadow
war."
This breathing space for reflection is utilized to liquidate human rights
activists and writers (among other leading community leaders). These
writers particularly distinguished themselves in excavating tactical
stealth enshrouded in geo-politics. In the process, they were equipping
the masses through their exposés with tools not just to think astutely but
how to think more critically as a dispossessed nation. The state is
succeeding in silencing such voices even as I write! The onus of violence,
no doubt, rests on the shoulders of the state. The world must realize that
the Tamils are responding to the violence against them. [8]
The lop-sided justice, nonetheless, is that the international community is
keen on seeing the disarming
of the dispossessed. Will international pressure be brought to bear
equally upon the Sri Lanka state to renounce its violence?

It is imperative that the
international community reach a universal Archimedean point
from which to leverage Western foreign policies. This must, one hopes,
bring into sharper focus the concept of the West relating justly towards
developing-world conflicts -- many of which are the legacies of
colonialism.

Reverend Sinnathurai, currently reading for his Doctorate, is
a Christian priest trained in Canada and the U.K. He traveled extensively
in the northeastern Tamil territories post-tsunami for humanitarian work
and did a series of interviews with the de facto Tamil state senior
officials (LTTE Top Guns). These articles, entitled “Eelam Encounters,”
can be read at
www.Sangam.org.

NOTES

[1] V. Navaratnam, The Fall And Rise of The Tamil Nation (Tamilian
Library, 1995). A comprehensive study of the Tamil Question.
[2] E M Thornton, Sri Lanka: Island of Terror -- An Indictment (ERO,
1984).[3] Adrian Wijemanne, War
and Peace in Post-colonial Ceylon, 1948-1991 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman
Limited, 1996).[4] Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah,
Buddhism Betrayed? (The University of Chicago, 1992).[5] Mark Juergensmeyer,
Terror in the Mind of God (University of California Press, 2003). [6] It is useful to remember
that the ancient Tamils practised a well-developed form of democracy in which
the elders and village headmen, in the presence of the community gathered under
the shade of a large tree in order to discuss, gathered to discuss communitarian
politics and vital social matters. As a result, they issued judgments on legal,
ethical and moral issues with the consensus of the community and settled
disputes righteously. Such an upright system later took on the name Panchayam.
This practise of democracy might have been a precursor to the Greek
Agora.[7] S. Sivanayagam, Sri
Lanka: Witness to History (Sivayogam, 2005). A Senior Journalist's memoirs.
[8] The political writings of Taraki at www.tamilnation.org.
Taraki was assassinated in April 2005.